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The New Rove-Cheney Assault on Reality

The New Rove-Cheney Assault on Reality

The opening salvo, fired on Fox News during Thanksgiving week,
aroused little notice: Dana Perino, the former White House press
secretary, declared that "we did
not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush's
term." Rudy Giuliani upped the
ante on ABC's "Good Morning America" in January. "We had no domestic
attacks under Bush," he said. "We've had one under Obama." (He apparently meant the Fort Hood shootings.)

Now the revisionist floodgates have opened with the simultaneous
arrival of Karl Rove's memoir and Keep America Safe, a new right-wing noise machine
invented by Dick Cheney's daughter Liz and the inevitable William
Kristol. This gang's rewriting of history knows few bounds. To hear them
tell it, 9/11 was so completely Bill Clinton's fault that it
retroactively happened while he was still in office. The Bush White
House is equally blameless for the post-9/11 resurgence of the Taliban,
Al Qaeda and Iran. Instead it's President Obama who is endangering
America by coddling terrorists and stopping torture.

Could any of this non-reality-based shtick stick? So far the answer
is No. Rove's book and Keep America Safe could be the best political
news for the White House in some time. This new eruption of
misinformation and rancor vividly reminds Americans why they couldn't
wait for Bush and Cheney to leave Washington.

But the old regime's attack squads are relentless and shameless. The
Obama administration, which put the brakes on any new investigations
into Bush-Cheney national security malfeasance upon taking office, will
sooner or later have to strike back. Once the Bush-Cheney failures in
Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran again come home to roost, as they undoubtedly
and explosively will, someone will have to remind our amnesia-prone
nation who really enabled America's enemies in the run-up to 9/11 and in
its aftermath.

There's a good reason why Rove's memoir is titled "Courage and
Consequence," not "Truth or Consequences." Its spin is so uninhibited
that even "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job!" is repackaged with an alibi. The
book's apolitical asides are as untrustworthy as its major events. For
all Rove's self-proclaimed expertise as a student of history, he writes
that eight American presidents assumed office "as a result of the
assassination or resignation of their predecessor." (He's off by only three.) After a
peculiar early narrative detour to combat reports of his late adoptive
father's homosexuality, Rove burnishes his family values cred with
repeated references to his own happy heterosexual domesticity. This,
too, is a smoke screen: Readers learned months before the book was
published that his marriage
ended in divorce.

Rove's overall
thesis on the misbegotten birth of the Iraq war is a stretch even
by his standards. "Would the Iraq war have occurred without W.M.D.?" he
writes. "I doubt it." He claims that Bush would have looked for other
ways "to constrain" Saddam Hussein had the intelligence not revealed
Iraq's "unique threat" to America's security. Even if you buy Rove's
predictable (and easily refuted) claims that the White House neither
hyped, manipulated nor cherry-picked the intelligence, his portrait of
Bush as an apostle of containment is absurd. And morally offensive in
light of the carnage that followed. As Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin
Powell's former chief of staff, said on MSNBC,
it's "not a very comforting thing" to tell the families of the American
fallen "that if the intelligence community in the United States, on
which we spend about $60 billion a year, hadn't made this colossal
failure, we probably wouldn't have gone to war."

In this spectrum, the Keep America Safe crowd is a fringe. But it
still must be challenged. As we've learned the hard way, little
fictions, whether about "death panels" or "uranium
from Africa," can grow mighty fast in the 24/7 media echo chamber.
Liz Cheney's unsupportable charges are not quarantined in the Murdoch
empire. Her chummy off-camera relationship with a trio of network news
stars, reported last week by Joe Hagan in New York magazine,
helps explain her rise in the so-called mainstream media. For that
matter, Thiessen was challenged more thoroughly in an interview
by Jon Stewart on "The Daily Show" on Tuesday than he has been by
any representative of non-fake television news.

What could yet give some traction to the Keep America Safe
revisionism is the backdrop against which it is unfolding: an Iraq
election with an uncertain and possibly tumultuous outcome; the
escalation of the war in Afghanistan; and an increasingly cavalier Iran.
If any of these national security theaters goes south, those in the
Rove-Cheney cohort will claim vindication in their campaign to pin their
own failings on their successors.

Obama may well make - or is already making - his own mistakes.
And he will bear responsibility for them. But they must be seen in the
context of the larger narrative that the revisionists are now working so
hard to obscure. The most devastating terrorist attack on American soil
did happen during Bush's term, after the White House repeatedly ignored
what the former C.I.A. director, George Tenet, called
the "blinking red" alarms before 9/11. It was the Bush defense
secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, who lost bin Laden in Tora Bora, not the
Obama Justice Department appointees vilified by Keep America Safe. It
was Bush and Cheney, with the aid of Rove's propaganda campaign, who promoted sketchy and often suspect intelligence about
Saddam's imminent "mushroom clouds." The ensuing Iraq war allowed those
who did attack us on 9/11 to regroup in Afghanistan and beyond - and
emboldened Iran, an adversary with an actual nuclear program.

The Iran piece of the back story doesn't end there. As The
Times reported last weekend, Dick Cheney's former company,
Halliburton, kept doing business with Tehran through foreign subsidies
until 2007, even as the Bush administration showered it with $27 billion
in federal contracts, including a no-bid contract to restore oil
production in Iraq. It was also
the Bush administration that courted, lionized and catered to Ahmed
Chalabi, the Machiavellian Iraqi who lobbied for the Iraq war,
supplied some of the more egregious "intelligence" on Saddam's W.M.D.
used to sell it, and has ever since flaunted his dual loyalty to Iran.

If we are really to keep America safe, it's essential we remember
exactly which American politicians empowered Iran, Al Qaeda and the
Taliban from 2001 to 2008, and why. History will be repeated not only if
we forget it, but also if we let it be rewritten by those whose
ideological zealotry and boneheaded decisions have made America less
safe to this day.

Further

Americans spent President's Day wishing we had one, honoring the 44 former actual ones we did have along with a few fictional contenders - Vote For Lisa Simpson! - and marching to protest the sick hollow shell of a human being now occupying a once-lofty office. Meanwhile, after just one ugly, tattered, inept, felonious year in office, The Cheeto has already been declared by 170 political pundits the worst president in history. What a surprise. Said no one ever.